2003 This year's
Nobel Prize for Economics is announced
to go to Robert F. Engle “for methods of analyzing economic time series
with time-varying volatility (ARCH)” and to Clive W. J. Granger [1934~]
“for methods of analyzing economic time series with common trends (cointegration)”.
Both laureates are from the US.

2003 This year's
Nobel Prize for Chemistry is
announced to be awarded “for discoveries concerning channels in cell
membranes”, to Peter
Agre [1949~] “for the discovery of water channels” and to Roderick MacKinnon
[1956~] “for structural and mechanistic studies of ion channels”. Both laureates
are from the US.

2002 Parliamentary elections in the last of four sectors of Indian-occupied
Kashmir (Jammu-Kashmir state). The Muslim majority abstains in droves, except
where the Indian troops force them to vote. The dates of the elections in
the other three sectors were 16 September, 24 September, 01 October. The
overall result is that the long-ruling National Conference finishes first
but looses its majority. It will not try to form a coalition. Thus the parties
in second and third place  the national opposition Congress party
and Kashmir's People's Democratic Party  together will form a government.

2002 Electric utility holding company Allegheny
Energy Inc. (AYE) announces that it is in default on some of its loans,
after it failed to post additional collateral following a credit downgrade.
On the New York Stock Exchange, its stock drops from its previous close
of $7.52 to an intraday low of $3.25 and closes at $3.80, with 10% of its
125 million shares being traded. It had traded as high as $43.86 as recently
as 23 April 2002, and $54.90 on 21 May 2001. [5~year price chart >]

2002 Having, the previous evening, predicted declining
revenues and announced higher than expected losses (10 cents a share for
the quarter ended in September), Oak Technology (OAKT), a developer of optical
storage and digital imaging semiconductors, is downgraded by Adams Harkness
from Sector Perform to Sector Underperform. On the NASDAQ, its stock drops
from its previous close of $2.82 to an intraday low of $1.23 and closes
at $1.28. It had traded as high as $17.55 as recently as 17 April 2002,
and $30.50 on 18 September 2000. [< 5~year price chart]

2002 The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences announces
the award of the Nobel Prize in Physics for 2002 with one half jointly to
Raymond
Davis Jr (USA) [14 Oct 1914~], and
Masatoshi Koshiba (Japan) [19 Sep 1926~] “for pioneering contributions to
astrophysics, in particular for the detection of cosmic neutrinos” and the
other half to Riccardo Giacconi (USA) [06
Oct 1931~] “for pioneering contributions to astrophysics, which have
led to the discovery of cosmic X-ray sources”. Raymond Davis is now an Alzheimer
patient. According to Nobel Foundation
rules, the prizes can be given to no more than three scientists. Hence the
citation for the work on solar neutrinos must leave out people like John
Bahcall, Vladimir Gribov, Bruno Pontecorvo, Stanislav Mikheyev, Alexei Smirnov
and Lincoln Wolfenstein, who all played crucial roles in developing the
theory. Absent as well are the leaders of other important experimental endeavors
like the Sudbury Neutrino Observatory in Canada. // http://www.nobel.se/physics/laureates/2002/press.html
// Solar
Neutrino Experiments (Davis) //  MORE
 EVEN
MORE

2001 The main body of the Russian submarine Kursk,
is raised from 108 m down on be Barents Sea floor where it had sunk on 12
August 2000, killing all 116 on board. The salvage operation is conducted
from a giant barge with computer-controlled cables by the Dutch companies
Mammoet and Smit International, contracted for some $65 million by the Russian
government.
2000 Presidential elections in Poland. Ex-Communist Aleksander
Kwasniewski, 46, is reelected to a second five-year term with over 50 %
of the vote. Of the other 11 candidates, liberal without party Andrzej Olechowski,
54, gets about 16%. The leader of the AWS-Solidarity coalition, Marian Krzaklewski,
50, gets about 10 to 14 %. Last of all, pathetic Lech Walesa, 57, the hero
of the ending of Communist rule, completely out of touch with today's problems,
recalling his role and recriminating against everyone else, gets 1%. 2000 FAILED DARWIN AWARD ATTEMPT: Suicidal Couple Survives
Pills, Gas, and Gun  A Croatian policeman and his fiancée have
survived a suicide attempt that included poisoning by gas, sleeping pills
and a gunshot to the temple, state news agency Hina reports. The policeman
and his girlfriend, bent on ending their lives together, shut themselves
in a car, took handfuls of sleeping pills with alcohol and hooked up a hose
to the car's exhaust pipe. The attempt failed and the dazed policeman took
his gun and fired through his right temple. The shot did not kill him but
at that point his girlfriend gave up and called an ambulance. The policeman
was taken to hospital while his girlfriend was treated and released. 1999 La justicia británica aprueba la extradición del ex
general Augusto José Ramón Pinochet Ugarte a España. 1999 Visto bueno a la Ortografía de la lengua española
que, con el consenso de las 22 academias de la lengua española, actualiza
e ilustra las normas ortográficas básicas que se hicieron oficiales a mediados
del siglo XIX. 1998 It is announced that the 1998
Nobel Literature Prize will be awarded to Portuguese novelist and man of
letters José Saramago [16 Nov 1922~].

1998 This
year's IgNobel
Prizes are awarded in the following fields:
SAFETY ENGINEERING Troy
Hurtubise, of North Bay, Ontario, for developing, and personally testing
a suit
of armor that is impervious to grizzly bears.
BIOLOGY
Peter Fong of Gettysburg
College, Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, for contributing to the happiness
of clams by giving them Prozac.
PEACE Prime
Minister Shri Atal Bihari Vajpayee of India and PrimeMinister
Nawaz Sharif of Pakistan, for their aggressively peaceful explosions
of atomic bombs.
CHEMISTRY Jacques
Benveniste of France, for his homeopathic
discovery that not only does water have memory*, but that the information
can be transmitted over telephone lines and the Internet. [* Benveniste
won the 1991 IgNobel Chemistry Prize, for his discovery that water, H2O,
is an intelligent liquid, and for demonstrating to his satisfaction that
water is able to remember events long after all trace of those events has
vanished..]
SCIENCE EDUCATION Dolores
Krieger, Professor Emerita, New York University, for demonstrating the
merits of therapeutic
touch, a method by which nurses manipulate the energy fields of ailing
patients by carefully avoiding physical contact with those patients.
STATISTICS Jerald
Bain of Mt. Sinai
Hospital in Toronto and Kerry Siminoski of the University
of Alberta for their carefully measured report,
"The Relationship Among Height, Penile Length, and Foot Size."
PHYSICS. Deepak Chopra
of The Chopra Center for Well Being, La Jolla, California, for his unique
interpretation of quantum physics as it applies to life, liberty, and the
pursuit of economic happiness. [cf. Chopra's books "QuantumHealing,"
"Ageless
Body, Timeless Mind," etc., deeply packed with his wisdom.]
ECONOMICS. Richard
Seed of Chicago for his efforts to sow the seed of economic progress
by cloning himself and other human beings.
MEDICINE
To Patient Y and to his doctors, Caroline Mills, Meirion Llewelyn, David
Kelly, and Peter Holt, of Royal Gwent Hospital, in Newport, Wales, for
the cautionary medical report, "A Man Who Pricked His Finger and Smelled
Putrid for 5 Years."

1997 Chrysler to pay $260 million for boy's
death due to faulty minivan
A Federal jury orders Chrysler to hand over $260 million to the Jiminez
family, whose son, Sergei, was killed after being jettisoned from
the third seat of a Chrysler minivan. The accident happened in 1987
when the Jiminez's Dodge Caravan was hit by another vehicle traveling
along at just 8 km/h. During the impact, the minivan's rear liftgate
malfunctioned, and the back door flew open, allowing the boy to be
ejected on to the pavement. Sadly,
this was not an isolated incident. The Federal government reported
that between 1984 and 1994, thirty-seven deaths could be traced to
faulty liftgate latches on Chrysler's minivans. The automaker was
hit with 100 lawsuits related to the faulty liftgate, but the government
still held off on mandating a recall of the latches. A day before
the ruling, however, Chrysler recalled 1.1 million minivans, a decision
estimated to have cost the car giant roughly $30 million. Surprisingly,
this move, coupled with anticipation of the Federal jury's decision
against Chrysler, caused just a small decline in Chrysler's stock,
which closed on October 7 at 34-15/16, following a 3/16 drop.

^1992
Microsoft reveals counterfeit MS-DOS seized
Microsoft announces that some $9 million
of allegedly counterfeit Microsoft software had been seized by US
marshals in a series of raids in September 1992. The company said
some sixteen truckloads of Microsoft MS-DOS were seized from ten locations
in California and New Jersey. Microsoft officials accompanied federal
marshals on the raids. At the time, the Senate was considering a bill
to make software counterfeiting a felony.

^1991
Slave graves found under New York
A colonial-era burial site for Black slaves is discovered by construction
workers hired to build a new federal building in lower Manhattan.
Over a dozen skeletons have been discovered in the only known Revolutionary-era
cemetery for African-Americans. The site, now located at Broadway
and Reade Street, was once the northern section of an eighteenth century
potter's field, where records show there existed a "Negro Burial Ground"
that was closed in 1790.

^1972
Vietnam: Possible breakthrough at Paris
peace talks Rumors
arise that there is a breakthrough in the secret talks that had been
going on in a villa outside Paris since August 1969. Henry Kissinger
[27 May 1923~], President Richard Nixon's national security advisor,
and North Vietnamese negotiators conducted the peace talks. Le Duc
Tho [14 Oct 1911 – 13 Oct 1990],
who had taken over as chief negotiator for Hanoi from Xuan Thuy [02
Sep 1912 – 18 Jun 1985], presented a draft peace agreement proposing
that two separate administrations remain in South Vietnam to negotiate
general elections. This proposal accepted in substance earlier US
terms, and by doing so dropped previous Communist demands for a political
solution to accompany a military one.
Tho, believing that the US government was eager for peace in Vietnam
before the elections, proposed that the United States and North Vietnam
arrange a cease-fire, governing all military matters between themselves.
The proposal also suggested leaving the political questions to be
settled by the Vietnamese sides, who would be governed by a "National
Council of Reconciliation" until a final settlement could be reached.
Hanoi and Saigon would continue to occupy the territory each presently
held until then. Kissinger, who considered Hanoi's offer a breakthrough,
cabled South Vietnamese President Nguyen Van Thieu [05 Apr 1923 –
29 Sep 2001] "to seize as much territory as possible. In light
of this new development in Paris, President Nixon ordered the commencement
of Operation Enhance Plus, a program designed to provide South Vietnam
with $2 billion worth of military equipment to replace what was lost
during the heavy fighting of the 1972 North Vietnamese Easter Offensive.

^1970
Solzhenitsyn wins Nobel Prize in literature
The best-known living Russian writer,
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, wins the Nobel Prize for literature. Born
on 11 December 1918 in the Soviet Union, Solzhenitsyn was a leading
writer and critic of Soviet internal oppression. Arrested in 1945
for criticizing the Stalin regime, he served eight years in Russian
prisons and labor camps. Upon his release in 1953 he was sent into
"internal exile" in Asiatic Russia. After Stalin's death, Solzhenitsyn
was released from his exile and began writing in earnest.
His first publication, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich
(1963), appeared in the somewhat less repressive atmosphere of Nikita
Khrushchev's regime (1955-1964). The book was widely read in both
Russia and the West, and its harsh criticisms of Stalinist repression
provided a dramatic insight into the Soviet system. Eventually, however,
Soviet officials clamped down on Solzhenitsyn and other Russian artists,
and henceforth his works had to be secreted out of Russia in order
to be published. These works included Cancer Ward (1968)
and the massive three-volume The Gulag Archipelago, 1918-1956
(1973-1978). The Soviet government
further demonstrates its displeasure over Solzhenitsyn's writings
by preventing him from personally accepting his Nobel Prize in 1970.
In 1974, he would be expelled from the Soviet Union for treason, and
move to the United States. Although celebrated as a symbol of anticommunist
resistance, Solzhenitsyn was also extremely critical of many aspects
of American society; particularly what he termed its incessant materialism.

^1970
Vietnam: 1970 Communists reject Nixon's
peace proposal
The Communist delegation in Paris rejects President Richard Nixon's
proposal of 07 October as "a maneuver to deceive world opinion.
Nixon had announced five-point proposal to end the war, based on a
"standstill" cease-fire in place in South Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia.
He proposed eventual withdrawal of US forces, unconditional release
of prisoners of war, and political solutions reflecting the will of
the South Vietnamese people.
The US Senate had adopted a resolution expressing support for President
Nixon's initiative, calling the proposals "fair and equitable," and
there was hope that the Communists would respond accordingly. However,
the North Vietnamese and Viet Cong negotiators refused to even consider
Nixon's proposal, reiterating their previous and long-standing demand
for an unconditional and total withdrawal of US forces from Indochina
and the overthrow of the "puppet" leaders in Saigon. US officials
publicly urged the Soviet Union to use its "considerable influence"
with the Communists to persuade them to accept President Nixon's new
proposals, but the North Vietnamese stood their ground.

1968 US forces in Vietnam launch Operation Sealord, an
attack on North Vietnamese supply lines and base areas.

^1968
Vietnam: US and South attack Mekong Delta
waterways
Operation Sealords is launched in the
Mekong Delta by the US and South Vietnamese navies. This operation
was ordered by newly appointed Commander Naval Forces Vietnam, Vice-Admiral
Elmo R. Zumwalt, Jr., who established Task Force 194 to operate along
the canals and less-traveled waterways of the Mekong Delta to interdict
Viet Cong infiltration routes from Cambodia. Additionally, TF 194
was to harass Communist forces in the area and, with the assistance
of ground and air forces, pacify the Delta region. Under Zumwalt's
direction, US and South Vietnamese naval forces worked together to
secure the waterways of the Mekong Delta. When the Vietnamization
program began in 1969, the US Navy instituted ACTOV (Accelerated Turnover
to Vietnam), the Navy's Vietnamization plan, and by April 1971, all
Sealords operations had been turned over to the South Vietnamese Navy.

^1967
Che Guevara is captured in Bolivia.
A Bolivian guerrilla force led by Marxist revolutionary Che Guevara
[14 Jun 1928 – 09 Oct 1967] is defeated in a skirmish with a
special detachment of the Bolivian army. Guevara was wounded, captured,
and executed the next day. Born in Argentina, Guevara believed that
a man of action could revolutionize a people. He played a pivotal
role in the Cuban Revolution of 1956-1959 and encouraged Fidel Castro
to pursue his communist, anti-American agenda. After holding several
positions in Castro's government, he disappeared from Cuba in 1965.
He secretly traveled to the Congo, where he trained rebels, and in
1966 resurfaced in Bolivia as leader of another guerrilla group. Since
his death, Guevara has been idolized as a hero of leftist Third World
revolution.

^1957
Spy gets lenient sentence
Jack Soble, a confessed Soviet spy, is sentenced in New York to seven
years in prison for espionage. Soble, a government worker, pleaded
guilty to obtaining national defense secrets with the intent of selling
them to the United States. Soble's wife Myra (Perske) Soble [18 Mar
1904–] and his associate Jacob Albam also received prison sentences
as conspirators. For Soble's cooperation and guilty plea, several
more serious charges, including one that carried the death penalty,
were dropped at the start of his trial.

^1941 Invading Germans reach Sea of Azov in USSR
The German invasion of the Soviet Union
begins a new stage, with Hitler's forces capturing Mariupol. The Axis
power reached the Sea of Azov. Despite the fact that Germany and Russia
had signed a "pact" in 1939, each guaranteeing the other a specific
region of influence without interference from the other, suspicion
remained high. Despite warnings from his advisers that Germany could
not fight the war on two fronts (as Germany's experience in World
War I proved), Hitler became convinced that England was holding out
against repeated German air assaults, refusing to surrender, because
it had struck a secret deal with Russia. Fearing he would be "strangled"
from the East and the West, he created, in December 1940, "Directive
No. 21: Case Barbarossa"-the plan to invade and occupy the very nation
he had actually asked to join the Axis only a month before!
On 22 June 1941, after having postponed
the invasion of Russia when Italy's attack on Greece forced Hitler
to bail out his struggling ally in order to keep the Allies from gaining
a foothold in the Balkans, three German army groups struck Russia
hard by surprise. The Russian army was larger than German intelligence
had anticipated, but they were demobilized. Stalin had shrugged off
warnings from his own advisers, even Winston Churchill himself, that
a German attack was imminent. By the end of the first day of the invasion,
the German air force had destroyed more than 1000 Soviet aircraft.
And despite the toughness of the Russian troops, and the number of
tanks and other armaments at their disposal, the Red Army was disorganized,
enabling the Germans to penetrate up to 500 km into Russian territory
within the next few days. Hitler's battle for Stalingrad and Moscow
still lay ahead, but the capture of Mariupol, at the sea's edge, signaled
the beginning of the end of Russia-as least as far as Hitler's propaganda
machine was concerned. Soviet Russia has been vanquished!" Otto
Dietrich, Hitler's press chief, announced to foreign journalists the
very next day.

^
1937 Marriage of mystery novel characters of Dorothy Sayers
Fictional detective Lord Peter Wimsey
finally marries Harriet Vane, a prickly mystery writer he has pursued
through several novels, in the novel Busman's Honeymoon.
The novel, by Dorothy Leigh Sayers [14 Jun 1893 – 17 Dec 1957],
was one of the last featuring the two English sleuths.
Sayers, whose father was an Oxford teacher and minister, became one
of the first women to receive a degree from Oxford. Although the family
moved to the country when Sayers was 4, she received an excellent
education in Latin, French, history, and mathematics from her father
and won a scholarship to Oxford. She received highest honors on her
final exams in 1915. Although women at the time were not granted degrees,
the rules changed retroactively in 1920. After Oxford, Sayers worked
as a poetry editor in Oxford and a teacher in France. She returned
to London to work as a freelance editor and advertising copywriter
for England's largest ad agency. She later turned her experiences
at the agency to comic fodder in Murder Must Advertise (1933).
She began writing detective fiction
in the early 1920s, and her first novel, Whose Body?, was
published in 1923. It introduced the educated and fanciful Lord Peter
Wimsey, who over the course of some dozen novels and many short stories
emerged as a complex, intriguing character, comic and lighthearted
at times but plagued with nightmares and nervous disorders from his
service in World War I. In Strong Poison (1930), Wimsey solves
a mysterious poisoning and wins freedom for the wrongly accused mystery
novelist Harriet Vane, with whom he falls in love. In Gaudy Night
(1935), set at an Oxford reunion, Vane finally accepts Wimsey. The
pair are married and set off on a comical honeymoon, accompanied by
Wimsey's faithful butler, Bunter, in Busman's Honeymoon (1937).
Sayers herself had an unhappy romance
in the early 1920s and had a child in 1924. Two years later, she married
Scottish journalist Oswald Atherton Fleming, who became an invalid
soon afterward. She spent the next 25 years caring for him, until
his death in 1950. With G.K. Chesterton [29 May 1874 – 14 Jun
1936], Sayers founded the Detection Club, a group of mystery writers.
She edited an important anthology called Great Short Stories of
Detection, Mystery and Horrors from 1928 to 1934. After the late
1930s, she wearied of detective fiction, and having won enough financial
independence to write what she liked, she returned to her academic
roots and wrote scholarly treatises on aesthetics and theology, as
well as translations of Dante [Jun 1265 – 13 Sep 1321] and others.

1924 Jazz music banned from churches by the National
Lutheran Conference.1919 Volstead Prohibition Enforcement
Act passed by US Senate and House of Representatives.1918
Antonio Maura y Montaner presenta al rey de España Alfonso XIII la
dimisión de su Gabinete en pleno. 1917 León Trotski
es elegido presidente del Soviet de San Petersburgo. 1912
first Balkan War begins: Montenegro declares war on the Ottoman
Empire (Turkey), disregarding the previous day's warning from the Western
powers to the Balkan League that they would not countenance action against
Turkey or any change in the territorial status quo. 1886
Start of the Sherlock Holmes The
Adventure of the Noble Bachelor
1862 Battle of Perryville (Chaplin Hills), the largest Civil War
combat to take place in Kentucky. -- Confederate invasion is halted 1855 Second Chinese War begins, as the ship Arrow,
flying the British flag, is boarded by Chinese who arrest the crew.1843 The unequal British Supplementary Treaty of the Bogue
(supplementary to the Treaty of Nanking of 29 August 1842) grants British
citizens in China extraterritorial rights, by which they are under the control
of their own consuls and not subject to Chinese law. It also included a
most-favored-nation clause, guaranteeing to Britain all privileges that
China might grant to any other power.1840 King William
I of Holland abdicates. 1822 first eruption of
Galunggung (Java) sends boiling sludge into valley 1814
Apertura del Congreso de Viena, que tuvo como objetivo reconstruir las fronteras
de Europa y los gobiernos tradicionales, totalmente trastocados después
de las conquistas de Napoleón. 1804 Se proclama
emperador de Haití Jean Jacques Dessalines, tras la expulsión de los franceses
de la isla. 1775 Officers decide to bar slaves
and free blacks from Continental Army 1706 Las tropas
de Felipe de Anjou toman la ciudad de Cuenca en una de las operaciones de
la guerra de sucesión española. 1690 Belgrade retaken by
the Turks. 1604 Kepler's nova, a supernova,
is first sighted 1595 Los españoles consiguen la
rendición de la fortísima plaza francesa de Cambrai tras un duro sitio y
reiterados ataques. 0876 Battle of Andernach: Charles
the Bald is defeated.

^0451
Council of Chalcedon (4th ecumenical council) opens,
near Constantinople. Dealing
mainly with the Eutychian Christological heresy, the council would
create a confession of faith which has ever since been regarded as
the highest word in early Christian orthodoxy. The
early Christians had many different ideas of exactly what it meant
for Jesus to be the Christ and the Son of God. What was Jesus' real
nature and person like? How was he related to God and to the Father?
To what degree was he truly human? There were many debates over these
issues in the fourth through the sixth centuries of the church.
When Constantine became emperor of
the Roman Empire and made Christianity a legal religion, he believed
unity of the Church was important to the political strength of the
empire. So in 325 he called a Council at Nicea to settle disputes
over the nature of Christ. The council issued the Nicene Creed, agreeing
that Christ was both man and God and that as the Son of God he had
the same divine nature as the Father.
Once it was accepted that Jesus was both fully God and fully man,
debates began to rage over how Christ's deity was related to his humanity.
One group, the Apollinarians, said the divine Word of Christ took
the place of Jesus' human mind and will so that his divine nature
was always predominant. Others argued back that if Jesus did not have
a human mind and will he could not be fully human. Yet another group
argued that at the incarnation the divine and human were so combined
in the person of Christ as to produce a new, unique individual. Others
again thought that the divine and human natures of Jesus were kept
so separate that it was almost like he was two persons. Very often
each conflicting group became associated with a particular city -
Antioch, Alexandria, Rome, Constantinople, so that political rivalry
became entangled in theological debate.
In July 450, Emperor Theodosius died from a fall off his horse and
his brother-in-law Marcian ascended the imperial throne. One of Marcian's
first acts was to call a church council to deal with some of these
religious problems. He hoped for religious unity as a support to the
political unity of the empire--a political unity to face the growing
military threat from the east. On this day, 08 October 451, the largest
of the seven ecumenical church councils assembled at Chalcedon, near
Constantinople or modern Istanbul. Five or six hundred bishops were
present representing the many conflicting views found within the church.
After much debate, on 22 October, a Chalcedonian creed was adopted
which re-affirmed the divine and human natures of Christ recognized
at Nicea and further stated that the two natures of Christ were "without
confusion, without conversion, without severance, and without division.
Jesus was affirmed as being both fully divine and human. His two natures
were combined in one person without his becoming less divine or less
human. The work Christ did was the work of his whole person, not of
one nature or another. In that day Pope Leo stated the Chalcedonian
position that in Christ the lowliness of man and the majesty of God
perfectly pervade one another...the two natures make only one person.
Some of the Egyptian, Turkish
and eastern Christians did not accept the Chalcedon Creed, but it
has been accepted by the Roman Catholic, the Eastern Orthodox, and
Protestant churches. The Chalcedon Creed is an important basic statement
on the nature and person of Christ, but even with this creed which
has stood for centuries, Christ's person and nature remains a mystery.
Tandis que l'Occident romain
est mis à sac par les Huns, un grand concile s'ouvre à Chalcédoine,
sur le Bosphore. Le concile réunit plusieurs centaines d'évêques orientaux
et des légats du pape pour traiter de querelles subtiles mais lourdes
de conséquences. Il rejette les doctrines du patriarche de Constantinople,
Nestorius, et d'un moine d'Alexandrie, Eutychès, sur les natures divine
et humaine du Christ. Le nestorianisme établit une distinction entre
les natures humaine et divine du Christ. Cette doctrine donnera naissance
à l'église syrienne orientale. Elle sera très active en Orient et
jusqu'en Mongolie et en Chine. Des communautés nestoriennes subsistent
aujourd'hui en Irak comme en Inde. Le monophysisme, à l'opposé, ne
veut voir dans le Christ que la nature divine. Il va se développer
dans l'église copte d'Egypte et au Proche-Orient en suscitant des
querelles sans fin avec Constantinople. Contre les nestoriens et les
monophysites, les évêques conciliaires réunis à Chalcédoine réaffirment
avec force le dogme de la Sainte Trinité (un Dieu en trois personnes).
Ils mettent aussi à égalité le patriarcat de Constantinople et le
siège papal de Rome, à la grande colère du pape Léon 1er qui rejette
ces conclusions du concile. La rupture entre l'orthodoxie grecque
et le catholicisme romain est déjà dans l'air. Autre conséquence du
concile: les régions orientales, fidèles au monophysisme et peu enclines
à défendre l'empereur de Constantinople, vont céder très vite lorsqu'elles
seront agressées par les disciples de Mahomet.

2005 CRPF (Central Reserve Police Force) assistant commandant
JD Umar, Sub Divisional Police Officer Vijay Bharti,
and ten jawans of CRPF, in India, at Baniadih village under
Kunda police station limits of Jharkhand’s Chatra district, where, while
conducting a raid in the morning, they cause the explosion of a bomb in
a box which they try to open, having mistaken it for a cash box of naxalite
Maoist guerrillas. 12 other members of the CRPF are wounded.2005
Some 80'000 persons by magnitude 7.7 earthquake with epicenter
at 34°30'N, 73°38'E, 26 km deep, about 10 km NE of Muzaffarabad, capital
of Pakistan-protected Kashmir, at 08:51 (03:51 UT; 09:21 in Indian-occupied
Kashmir, where the earthquake is deadly also, killing some 3000 persons).
Some 120'000 are injured, some 5 million made homeless. 11'000 of the dead
are in the city Muzaffarabad. — (051019)2004 James Chace,
US foreign policy thinker and historian, born on 16 October 1931.2004
Jacques Derrida, French Jewish philosopher born on 15 July 1930
in Algeria. He called his intentionally unintelligible theory “deconstruction”,
saying that all writing {not just his, where it is obvious} was full of
confusion and contradiction, and that the author's intent could not overcome
the inherent contradictions of language itself, robbing texts - whether
literature, history or philosophy - of truthfulness, absolute meaning, and
permanence. That was eventually applied to a whole range of arts and social
sciences, including linguistics, anthropology, political science, even architecture.2004 Mehmet Ferhuzade Tanik, Turkish truck driver, from
injuries suffered the previous week in an attack by terrorists in Iraq.
2004 Yasser al-Khatib, 18, a militant, Mohammed
Subuh, 17, a civilian, and a third Palestinian,
when an Israeli helicopter shoots a missile at what is thought to be three
militants trying to plant an explosive device northeast of the Jabalya refugee
camp, Gaza Strip. Four Palestinians are injured.2004 Hassan
Sharadha, 15, Palestinian boy, of injuries he sustained when Israeli
troops fired a tank shell into the Jabalya refugee camp the previous week.2004
Samah Samir Nassar, 10, Palestinian, shot in the stomach and the
left leg by Israeli troops, as she stood on the street in front of her home
in Beit Hanun, Gaza Strip.2004 Three terrorists, killed
by a US warplane, on a street in the Sadr City district of Baghdad, Iraq,
as one of them “was digging a hole and the other two were putting
a 155 mm artillery shell into the hole”, according to the US.2004 Thirteen persons, in a house in Fallujah, Iraq, attacked
in the early hours by US warplanes. The dead include a groom on his wedding
night. 17 persons are wounded. Accarding to the US, "credible intelligence
sources" reported terrorist leaders were meeting there. 2002
US Marine Lance Cpl. Antonio J. Sledd, 20, of Hillsbrough, Fla.,
and cousins Anas al-Kandari (born in 1981) [photo >]
and Jassem al-Hajiri (born in 1976), Kuwaitis and former
fighters in Afghanistan, who, from a pickup truck, fire, from one location
and then from another, at some of the 1000 US Marines from the 11th Marine
Expeditionary unit based in Camp Pendleton, California, who are conducting
war games since 01 October on uninhabited (but visited) Failaka island some
15 km east of Kuwait city. The two attackers are killed by Marines. US Marine
Lance Cpl. George R. Simpson, 21, of Dayton, Ohio, was wounded in the arm.2002 Palestinians: girl, Misa Zanun, 12; boys, Ahmed Radwan, 16;
and Mohammed Ashour, 18, in the evening, by Israeli army gunfire
in Rafah, Gaza Strip.2001 Stefano Romanello, Luca Fossati,
and 116 others as, in the morning fog at 08:15, a Copenhagen-bound
SAS airliner (an MD 87) swerves to avoid a Cessna which ought not to have
been on the runway at Milan's Linate airport, crashes into a baggage storage
building and bursts into flames. The dead include the 104 passengers and
6 crew members aboard the airliner, 4 persons aboard the small plane, and
4 baggage handlers in the small building. Fifty-six of the SAS victims were
Italians, 16 were Danes and two others were foreigners living in Denmark.
The two Cessna pilots were German, and one of the two passengers on the
eight-seater plane was Cessna's European representative, Romanello, who
was showing the aircraft in a promotional flight to a client, Fossati, the
president of Star, an Italian food company. The Cessna had stopped in Milan
while en route from Cologne, Germany to Paris. [??? not a direct route !!!]2001 All onboard a helicopter: five UN military observers, four
Ukrainian crew members, and a translator, shot down over the Kodor
Gorge region of Abkhasia, where the Abkhasian Aseri independentist government
say that Chechen and ethnic Georgian rebels have invaded in recent days
despite the presence of a Russian peacekeeping force. 1994
Brian
Hartley, English mathematician, born on 15 May 1939, whose
main topic was that of locally finite groups; he used his wide knowledge
of finite groups in proving properties of infinite groups which were in
a sense close to finite. There is a mountain in the Lake District of England
that he always wanted to climb and he decided to try it “before he
got too old”. He is not too old to make it to the top but he is too
old to avoid collapsing on the way down and dying on this day. 1992
Willy Brandt, político alemán

^
1990 Seventeen Palestinians shot by Israeli police
Seventeen Palestinians are shot and
killed, and over 100 are wounded, by Israeli police at a mosque on
Jerusalem's Temple Mount, a site sacred to Jews and Muslims. Although
both Palestinian and Israeli human rights groups accused police of
using unnecessary violence, an official report commissioned by the
Israeli government, released on October 26, claimed that a group of
Palestinians had started the conflict by throwing stones at police,
who then responded in self-defense. Even so, the report admitted that
there had been "an indiscriminate use of live ammunition" by the officers.
After an eight-month inquiry, Magistrate
Ezra Kama, an Israeli judge, overturned the findings of the government
committee, ruling that the crowd of Palestinians had not been responsible
for starting the conflict. In his 54-page report, Kama claimed that
a small group of police "accidentally" dropped a tear gas canister
near a crowd of Muslim women. After Muslims threw stones at the police
and drove them away, the police returned with reinforcements and began
firing into the crowd. The judge ruled that the Palestinians overreacted,
as did the police, who used live ammunition "without reasonable need"
and not "as a result of facing a real threat to their lives.
Kama did not, however, bring charges against the officers.
Sparking a wave of Palestinian attacks
on Jews, the incident caused the Israeli government to close the "Green
Line," marking the division between the territory captured by Israel
in 1967 and the 1948 border. Palestinians believed this to be a symbolic
victory in their fight against Israeli rule because it meant that
the Israeli government finally recognized a division that they had
long denied even existed. The Israeli government had previously insisted
that Israel and the occupied territory were part of a single "Eretz
Yisrael," the Holy Land believed to belong to the Jews both historically
and religiously. One journalist, Tariq Kayyal, said of the four-day
closure of the Green Line, "it proves that there are two nations,
two systems.

^1918: 25 German soldiers killed by
Sgt. Alvin York. He captures another 132 Germans. During
World War I, US Corporal Alvin C. York is credited with single-handedly
killing 25 German soldiers and capturing 132 in the Argonne Forest
of France. The action saved York's small detachment from annihilation
by a German machine-gun nest and won the reluctant warrior from backwater
Tennessee the Congressional Medal of Honor.
Born in a log cabin in rural Tennessee, Alvin Cullum York [13 Dec
1887 – 02 Sep 1964] supplemented his family's subsistence farming
by hunting and, like his father, was soon an expert marksman. He also
earned a reputation as a hell-raiser, and few imagined he would amount
to anything but trouble. About 1915, however, York experienced a religious
conversion after a friend was killed in a bar brawl. He joined the
fundamentalist Church of Christ in Christian Union and served as song
leader and Sunday school teacher at the local church.
Two months after the United States declared war on Germany in 1917,
York received his draft notice. Because his church opposed war, he
asked for conscientious objector status but was denied at both the
state and local level because the small Church of Christ in Christian
Union was not recognized as a legitimate Christian sect. Enlisting
in the 82nd Infantry Division, he was offered noncombat duty but eventually
agreed to fight after being convinced by a superior that America's
cause was just. On 08 October
1918, during the Allies' Meuse-Argonne Offensive, York and 15 other
soldiers of the 82nd Infantry Division, under the command of Sergeant
Bernard Early, were dispatched to seize a German-held rail point.
The soldiers lost their way and soon found themselves behind enemy
lines. A brief firefight ensued with a superior German force, and
in the confusion a group of Germans surrendered. However, German machine-gunners
on a hill overlooking the scene soon noticed the small size of Early's
patrol. Yelling in German for their comrades to take cover, the machine
gunners opened fire on the US soldiers, cutting down half the detachment,
including Sergeant Early. York
immediately returned fire and with his marksman eye began picking
off the German gunners. He then fearlessly charged the machine-gun
nest. Several of the other surviving US soldiers followed his lead
and probably contributed to the final total of 25 enemy killed. With
his automatic pistol, York shot down six German soldiers sent out
of the trench to intercept him. The German commander, thinking he
had underestimated the size of the US force, surrendered as York reached
the machine-gun nest. York and the other seven survivors took custody
of some 90 Germans and on the way back to the Allied lines encountered
40 or so other enemy troops, who were coerced to surrender by the
German major that the US soldiers had prisoner. The final tally was
132 prisoners. York was promoted
to the rank of sergeant and hailed as the greatest civilian soldier
of the war by several Allied leaders. He was given a hero's welcome
upon his return to the United States in 1919 and was awarded the Congressional
Medal of Honor, the nation's highest military decoration. After the
war he returned to Tennessee, where he lived on a farm given him by
that state. In the 1920s, he used his fame to raise funds for the
York Industrial Institute (now Alvin C. York Institute), a school
for underprivileged children in rural Tennessee. He later opened a
Bible school. His autobiography, Sergeant York, His Own Life Story
and War Diary, appeared in 1928. Sergeant York, the
1941 film starring Gary Cooper, was based on his life.

^1915 The last of over 100'000 soldiers killed in Battle
of Loos During
World War I, the Battle of Loos, part of the Allies' Artois Offensive,
ends with virtually no land gains for either side, but with a loss
of over one hundred thousand French, British, and German lives. The
first wave of British soldiers to attack the German line made surprising
advances toward Loos, catching off guard the pessimistic Allied command
who failed to follow the advance with adequate supplies. Lacking supplies,
the British were ordered to halt, giving the Germans time to launch
a counterattack that forced the British into a bloody retreat back
along the road they had come.
After reorganizing their forces, the Allies attempted another push
toward Loos, but the German line was fully entrenched by this point,
and little progress was made. During this stage of the battle, the
British used poisonous gas as a weapon for the first time, answering
Germany's employment of the deadly weapon six months earlier at the
Battle of Ypres. But Britain's first use of gas proved less than successful--discharged
on a windless day, the gas hung over no-man's land for a few minutes,
before drifting back into the British trenches where soldiers struggled
to don their poorly constructed gas masks as the German batteries
opened up on them.

^1871
First victims of Great Fire of Chicago as it begins
At nine o'clock on this Sunday evening,
the Great
Fire of Chicago breaks out in southwest Chicago, possibly started
by a cow kicking over an oil lamp in a barn owned by Patrick and Katherine
O'Leary. Within hours the conflagration, driven by a strong wind out
of the southwest, engulfs the center of the city, and around midnight
jumps the Chicago River, burning the southern portion of the city
to the ground by daybreak. As
thousands of panicked Chicagoans flee to the north, the fire pursues
them, and by Monday the flames have reached Fullerton Avenue, then
the northern-most limit of the city. Tuesday morning a saving rain
begins to fall, and the flames finally die out, leaving Chicago a
smoking ruin, with some 300 dead, 17'450 buildings destroyed in an
area over 6-km-long and 1-km-wide, the original Emancipation Proclamation
destroyed, and 98'500 people left homeless. The material damage is
estimated at $200 million. Several
factors contributed to the severity of the Great
Chicago Fire. The bustling Midwestern city was built primarily
of wood, and several woodworking industries operated within the city
limits. Also, rainfall during the preceding months had totaled just
one fourth of normal precipitation while early October was unseasonably
warm. Despite the devastation,
Chicago would rise again and continue to be the economic center of
the American West for decades to come. While, geographically, Chicago
is a midwestern city, economically it is the unofficial regional capital
and economic center of the US West. Because of its location on the
western edge of a system of lakes, rivers, and canals that link the
city to the East, Chicago was the natural destination for both western
raw materials moving East and eastern manufactured goods moving West.
After the Civil War, Chicago quickly
eclipsed St. Louis as the primary trading hub between the US East
and West, and the city's fate was inextricably tied to the rapidly
growing settlement and development of western natural resources. Millions
of dollars worth of cattle, lumber, swine, and grain that had originated
in the plains of Wyoming or the mountains of Montana were channeled
through the massive freight yards, slaughterhouses, and grain elevators
of Chicago. A look at a map of the US during the 1880s reveals that,
by the late 19th century, all railroads led to Chicago. Although the
Great Fire of 1871 destroyed Chicago's downtown, it left most of the
city's essential industrial infrastructure in place. Its towering
grain elevators and vast stockyards continued to collect the growing
output of the West, process it into pork sausages or two-by-fours,
and send it onward to the insatiable markets of the East.

1871 While the Great Chicago Fire starts, another deadly
blaze breaks out in Peshtigo, Wisconsin,1869 Franklin Pierce
14th president of US, dies in Concord, NH

^1862 Thousands of Yanks and Rebs at the Battle of Perryville
The Confederate invasion of Kentucky
stalls when Union General Don Carlos Buell stops General Braxton Bragg
at Perryville. In August, two Confederate forces, commanded by Bragg
and General Edmund Kirby Smith, entered Kentucky. The Rebels hoped
to raise troops and recoup territory lost during the summer. The invasion
started well when Bragg captured a Yankee garrison at Mumfordsville
on 28 August and Smith routed a Union force at Richmond on 30 August.
Despite the victories, the Confederates were disappointed by the response
they received from Kentuckians. Bragg's army hauled 15'000 extra rifles
to equip Kentuckians they hoped would join the Rebel army, but Union
sentiment and presence were strong in the state. Buell's army had
78'000 men, and another 80'000 Federal recruits were drilling in Louisville
and Cincinnati. With such a strong Union presence, many Kentuckians
were unwilling to take up with the Confederacy.
Buell marched 58'000 men toward Bragg's army while he sent another
20'000 to confront Smith. Buell caught up with the Confederates outside
of Perryville on 07 October. Bragg was installing a provisional government
in Frankfort, so General Leonidas Polk deployed the Confederate army
in front of the Union lines west of Perryville. Bragg arrived the
next morning at about 10:00, perturbed because Polk had not yet attacked
the Yankees. Bragg did not realize the size of the force he faced--he
assumed it was a single corps and not the bulk of Buell's army. He
ordered a strike for the early afternoon, hoping to fold the Union
left flank back upon the rest of the army. The plan nearly worked.
The assault drove Federals under the command of Alexander McCook back
in disarray, and an acoustic shadow prevented Buell, who was two miles
away, from hearing the battle. When Buell was finally alerted, he
rode forward and directed two brigades to effectively shore up McCook's
sagging line. A smaller Confederate attack against the right side
of the Yankee line was turned back, and nightfall halted the fighting.
Realizing that he was outnumbered, Bragg began a withdrawal.
The losses were heavy. Of 2000 Yankees
engaged in the battle, 4200 were killed, wounded, or missing; of 15'000
Confederates involved, 3400 were lost. Bragg retreated south to rejoin
Smith, and the Confederates slipped back to Tennessee through the
Cumberland Gap. Buell did not pursue, and as a result he was replaced
by General William Rosecrans. The Confederates abandoned the invasion
of Kentucky and it remained firmly in Federal hands for the rest of
the war.

^1820
Henri Christophe, a leader in the war of Haitian independence
(1791-1804) and later president (1807-1811) and self-proclaimed King
Henry I (1811-1820) of northern Haiti.
He was born on 06 October 1767 in Grenada, according to an official
document, of dubious truth, issued on his own order. He may have been
born free but became enslaved as a youth. He reached Haiti sometime
in his teens. In 1780, during the US War of Independence, he may have
fought in a French unit at Savannah, Georgia, either as an enlistee
or as the property of a French naval officer. Returning to Haiti,
he apparently worked initially as a domestic in an inn called La Couronne,
working his way up and marrying the proprietor's daughter. (Another
story has him marrying the French naval officer's daughter after buying
his freedom.) After the spirit
of the French Revolution spread to Haiti, Christophe in 1793 openly
embraced the party of the Haitian independence leader Toussaint-Louverture
[1743 – 07 Apr 1803] and became one of his chief lieutenants,
fighting the French, the British, and the Spaniards. The French attempted
to reconquer the colony in 1801, but Christophe held out until 1802,
surrendering only on the promise of a pardon and retention of his
military rank in the French army. He later joined Jean-Jacques Dessalines
[1758 – 17 Oct 1806] in
ousting the French and commanded the army under that ruler. After
Dessalines's assassination he was appointed provisional chief of the
nation by a military council. Although he thought despotism the only
form of government for his people, he summoned a constituent assembly
on December 18, 1806. Alexandre
Sabès Pétion [02 Apr 1770 – 29 Mar 1818], Christophe's only
rival for power, secured control in the south and west and thereby
secured majority representation in the Assembly. He was appointed
chairman to draft a constitution, which in its final form made Christophe
little more than a figurehead. In retaliation, Christophe led his
troops against Pétion but was defeated on 06 January 1807,
and he retreated north. In northern
Haiti, Christophe set up his own domain, which he ruled as King Henry
I from 1811 and for which he created a hereditary nobility comprising
4 princes, 8 dukes, 22 counts, 37 barons, and 14 knights. He established
an elaborate dress code and court ceremony and built himself eight
palaces and six châteaus. During his reign he distributed plantations
to military chiefs, restored soldier peasants to their former occupations,
and maintained a general prosperity. He built the famous Citadelle
Laferrière, a fortress south of his capital at Cap-Haïtien.
In August 1820 he suffered a paralytic stroke. When his condition
was learned, revolts broke out. In despair over his failure to pacify
the country, he shot himself, and his kingdom became part of the Haitian
republic.

^
1895 Berliner Gramophone Company is founded
Sound recording pioneer Emil Berliner
founds the Berliner Gramophone Company in Philadelphia on this day
in 1895. Berliner was born in 1851, immigrated to the United States
in 1870, and later worked for Alexander Graham Bell's telephone company.
In 1877, the year after Graham invented the telephone, Berliner developed
an improved telephone receiver. Ten years later, Berliner dramatically
improved the phonograph when he developed the flat gramophone record,
which quickly replaced Thomas Edison's recording cylinder. He also
developed a method for mass-producing records.

1895 King Zog I of Albania (1928-1939) 1890
Edward Vernon “Eddie” Rickenbacker,
aviator "Ace of Aces" (WW I), President and CEO of Eastern Airlines [1938-1963].
He died on 23 July 1973.

^
1879 Ch'en Ch'ien-sheng “Ch'en Tu-hsiu” (or: “Chen
Duxiu”). a founder of the Chinese Communist
Party (May 1920) and a major leader in developing the cultural basis
of revolution in China. He was removed from his position of leadership
in 1927 and was expelled from the Communist Party in 1929. He died
on 27 May 1942. Chen was born
to a wealthy family. His father, who had passed the first degree in
the civilservice examination and served as an official in the military
office in Manchuria, died when Chen was a few months old. The youngest
of four children, Chen was brought up by his mother and educated in
the Chinese Classics and traditional literature in turn by hisgrandfather,
several private tutors, and, finally, by his brother. In 1896 Chen
passed the first civil service examination summa cum laude in Huai-ning
and the next year passed the second in Nanking. His experience in
the examinations, however, convinced him of the irrelevance of the
traditional educational and governmental systems in the 20th century
and prompted him to become a social and political reformer. Consequently,
he entered the renowned Ch'iu-shih (“Truth-Seeking”) Academy
in Hang-chou, where he studied French, English, and naval architecture.
In 1901, Chen, after delivering speeches
against the Manchu regime in the capital of his home province, fled
to Nanking. He went to Japan the next year for study, enrolling at
the Tokyo Higher Normal School. Upon his return to China in 1903 he
assisted friends in establishing the subversive Kuo-min jih-jih
pao (“National Daily News”) in Shanghai, which was
quickly suppressed by the authorities. He then went back to Anhwei
in 1904, where he established a periodical to promote the use of the
vernacularin writing. In 1906 Chen again went to Japan and studied
at Waseda University in Tokyo but returned to Anhwei in the same year
to teach at a high school and establish another vernacular periodical
in Wu-hu. During his stay in Japan, Chen refused to join the revolutionary
party led by Sun Yat-sen because he did not wish to accept nationalism,
which was one of its tenets. According to some reports, in the following
year Chen went to study in France and became an enthusiastic admirer
of French culture. Upon his return to China in 1910 he visited Manchuria
for a short time before teaching at the Army Elementary School in
Hang-chou. After the overthrow of the Manchu monarchy and the establishment
of the republic in 1911, Chen became secretary general to the military
governor of Anhwei province and, concurrently, dean of the provincial
higher normal school. After taking part in the unsuccessful second
revolution against President Yüan Shih-k'ai in 1913, he fled
to Japan, where he helped to edit Chia-yin tsa-chih (“The
Tiger”), a liberal Chinese magazine calling for political reforms.
The period of Chen's greatest influence
on Chinese thought and politics began on his return to China in 1915,
when he established the monthly Ch'ing-nien tsa-chih (“Youth
Magazine”) in Shanghai, later renamed Hsin ch'ing-nien
(“New Youth”). In its pages he proposed that the youth
of China undertake a vast intellectual, literary, and cultural revolution
to rejuvenate the nation. Many of the young writers who contributed
to the monthly were later to become important intellectual and political
leaders. Among them were Hu Shih, a liberal promoter of the vernacular
literature, Lu Hsün, a leading short-story writer and essayist,
Li Dazhao [06 Oct 1888 – 28 Apr
1927], Chen's chief collaborator in the Chinese Communist Party, and
Mao Zedong [26 Dec 1893 – 09 Sep 1976].
Between 1916 and 1927, in the absence of a strong central power, numerous
warlords arose in most parts of the country, and their armed quarrels
all but rent China. Chen's revolutionary mission thus assumed even
greater importance; when, in 1917, he was appointed dean of the School
of Letters at the Peking National University, he took care to gather
around him many liberal and progressive professors and students. With
their help, he established the short-lived radical Mei-chou p'ing-lun
(“Weekly Critic”) in December 1918. Their “new thought”
and “new literature” dominated the May Fourth Movement,
named after the date of the massive student protests in 1919 against
the Chinese government's weak policy toward Japan and the Shantung
resolution of the Versailles Peace Conference, which was going to
transfer German rights in China to the Japanese. Because of his prominent
role in the movement, however, Chen was forced to resign his post
and was imprisoned for three months, from June to September 1919.
The Russian Revolution of 1917 impressed
Chen as a way of modernizing an underdeveloped country, and shortly
after his release he was converted to Marxism in Shanghai. There,
in May 1920, with a handful of followers, Chen founded the Chinese
Communist Party, of which he was elected secretary general. (The founding
date was offically set later as July 1921 by the present party leadership.)
He remained in that post as the party's undisputed leader for seven
years, often regarded as “China's Lenin.” In December
1920, in an effort to promote his Communist views, Chen accepted the
invitation of the rebel military governor of Kwangtung to become head
of the education board of the provincial government in Canton. In
the fall of 1922, Chen established the influential Hsiang-tao chou-pao
(“Guide Weekly”) as a successor to the “New Youth,”
which he had converted into a Communist organ two years earlier. After
his attendance at the Fourth Congress of the Comintern (the international
organization of Communist parties) in Moscow in November–December
1922, Chen reluctantly carried out the order of the Comintern to head
his party's collaboration with the Kuomintang (the Nationalist Party
founded by Sun Yat-sen); he was elected to that party's Central Committee
in January 1924. A year later, when the right wing of the Kuomintang
launched its attack on the Communists, Chen repeatedly proposed to
withdraw en masse from the Nationalist Party but was overruled by
the Comintern. After the collaboration collapsed in 1927, the Comintern
blamed Chen for the failure of the alliance with the Kuomintang and
had him removed from his position of leadership. In November 1929
he was expelled from the party. For several years, with the support
of the Chinese Trotskyists and other Communist dissenters, he tried
to regain influence in the party but failed.
On 15 October 1932, Chen was arrested by the foreign administration
of Shanghai, where he had been residing since 1927. Extradited to
Nanking, he was tried and in 1933 sentenced to 15 years in prison
by the Nationalist government. After the outbreak of the Sino-Japanese
War, he was released on parole in August 1937. Chen moved from place
to place until the end of 1938, when he arrived in the wartime capital,
Chungking, where he taught for a while in a junior high school. In
poor health and with few friends, he retired to Chiang-ching, a small
town west of Chungking, where he died.
A fearless protester, Chen rejected China's traditional values and
saw Marxism as a means to achieve a “mass democracy” with
the broad laboring masses as its base. He recognized, however, the
significant role played by the bourgeoisie in the Chinese revolution
that he hoped to achieve. During the last years of his life, Chen,
still a Socialist, denounced Stalin's dictatorship and defended such
democratic institutions as an independent, nonpartisan judiciary,
opposition parties, the free press, and free elections.

1878 Alfred James Munnings, British artist who died on
17 July 1959.  MORE
ON MUNNINGS AT ART 4 OCTOBER
with links to images. 1872 John Cowper Powys, Welsh
novelist, essayist, and poet, who died on 17 June 1963. He is known chiefly
for his long panoramic novels, including Wolf Solent (1929), A
Glastonbury Romance (1932), and Owen Glendower (1940). His
other works include an Autobiography (1934) and books of essays
such as The Meaning of Culture (1930), The Pleasures of Literature
(1938), The Art of Growing Old (1943). 1869
James Frank Duryea, US inventor who died on 15
February 1967. His brother Charles Duryea [15 Dec 1861 – 28 Sep 1938],
in 1886 at the Ohio state fair, saw a stationary gasoline engine that seemed
to him to be sufficiently compact to power a vehicle. By 1891 he had completed
a design, and with Frank he then constructed a car and engine in a rented
loft. In later years a controversy marred relations between the brothers;
Charles claimed that the model was completed to an operable state under
his guidance, while Frank asserted that he perfected the engine and transmission
while Charles was away. The car made a successful run in the streets of
Springfield on 22 September 1893. An improved version, largely the work
of Frank, appeared in 1895 and won several races. Thirteen copies of it
were manufactured and sold, but the company failed, and the brothers went
separate ways. Frank developed the Stevens-Duryea, one of the best known
of the early standard makes, a high-priced limousine that continued in production
into the 1920s. [a 1906 Stevens-Duryea >]1868
Max Slevogt, Danish artist who died on 20 September 1932. 
MORE
ON SLEVOGT AT ART 4 OCTOBER
with links to images. 1843 Kitty (Christine) Kielland (Ketty
Lange), Norwegian artist who died on 01 October 1914. — more 1840 first Hawaiian constitution proclaimed 1839
Henry Bacob, US artist who died in 1912. 1838 John
Milton Hay, poet. HAY ONLINE: The
Complete Poetical Works of John Hay, County
Ballads and Other Pieces, Poems 1833 Edmund Clarence Stedman, author. STEDMAN ONLINE:
The
Blameless Prince, and Other Poems, Poems
Now First Collected, The
Prince's Ball, Rip
Van Winkle and His Wonderful Nap 1810 James Wilson
Marshall, discoverer of gold in California.1808
José Tomás Urmeneta García-Abello, político chileno. 1776
Pieter Gerardus van Os, Dutch artist who died on 28 March 1839.
— more with links
to images.1697 Cornelis Troost, the Nederlands'.
Hogarth, or Watteau, Dutch painter who died on 07 March 1750.1676 Fray Benito
Jerónimo Feijoo y Montenegro, teacher and essayist, a leading
18th-century Spanish stylist, who died on 26 Sep 1764. A member of the Benedictine
order, he taught philosophy and theology at the University of Oviedo. His
essays publicized and encouraged the spread of the new scientific knowledge
and exalted reason. His two principal works, Teatro
crítico universal (1726–1739) and Cartas
eruditas y curiosas (1742–1760), deal with an encyclopaedic variety
of subjects: natural science, education, law, medicine, philology, and popular
beliefs or superstitions. — Other works of FEIJOO ONLINE: Apología
del escepticismo médico (1725) — Satisfacción
al Escrupuloso (1727) — Respuesta
al discurso fisiológico-médico (1727) — Ilustración
apologética (1729) — Suplemento
de el Teatro Crítico (1740) — Justa
repulsa de inicuas acusaciones (1749) — Adiciones
(1783)

^
1553 Jacques-Auguste de Thou (Thuanus),
French statesman, bibliophile, and historiographer who died on 07
May 1617. His detached, impartial approach to the events of his own
period made him a pioneer in the scientific approach to history.
Born into a family noted for its statesmen
and scholars, de Thou studied law at Orléans, Bourges, and
Valence. He had, however, first been intended for the church and succeeded
his uncle as a canon of Notre Dame in Paris. As a councilor of state,
he faithfully served both Henri III [19 Sep 1551 – 02 Aug 1589]
and Henri IV [13 Dec 1553 – 14 May 1610], becoming director
of the royal library in 1593. On becoming president of the Paris parlement
in 1595, he used his authority in the interests of religious peace,
negotiating the Edict of Nantes (13 Apr 1598) with the Protestants,
while in the name of Gallicanism
(a limitation of papal supremacy) opposing recognition of the Council
of Trent (13 Dec 1545 - 04 Dec 1563). This attitude incurred the
animosity of the Catholic hierarchy, which increased its persecution
when the first edition of his history appeared in 1604. After the
death of Henri IV, the queen regent, Marie de Médicis [26 Apr
1573 – 03 Jul 1642], refused him the position of premier president
of the parlement, appointing him instead a member of the conseil de
finances. The primary activity
of de Thou's life was the writing of his history. His object was to
produce a purely “scientific” and unbiased work chronicling
his era. Perhaps to achieve a necessary distance, he wrote Historia
sui temporis in Latin. The first 18 books, embracing the period
up to 1560, appeared in 1604, when they were immediately attacked
by those de Thou called “the invidious and dissentious.”
The second part (dealing with the first wars of religion, 1560–1572)
was put on the Church's Index of prohibited books. When the
third part (to 1574) and the fourth (to 1584) appeared in 1607–1608,
they caused a similar outcry, in spite of the historian's efforts
to remain impartial. In answer to his detractors de Thou wrote a useful
complement to the Historia, his series of memoranda (translated
into French as Mémoires de la vie de Jacques-Auguste de
Thou, 1711). The first complete
edition of the voluminous history, including the fifth part (to 1607),
was published in 1620 by the scholars Pierre Dupuy and Nicolas Rigault.
Five years later, the six volumes of memoirs were appended. The standard
French translation, Histoire universelle de Jacques-Auguste de
Thou, depuis 1543 jusqu'en 1607 (16 vol., 1734), was published
by the abbé Desfontaines and other scholars. Carefully researched,
drawn from reliable sources, de Thou's Historia is a model
of great erudition and exacting scholarship.

Thoughts for the day: Quit work and play for once.
I said once, not twice!"
Quit play and work for once.
Or even twice.
Quit work and pray for once.
You don't have to quit work in order to pray.
The family that prays together, stays together.
The family that pays together, stays together.
The family that plays together, strays together.
The school that prays together, pays together the court costs.
The man that pays to get her, stays lonely.
The man that pays to get her, does not belong in a family that prays together.
The family of gays that strays together, stays childless.
Continue work and pray at once.
Quit work you hate and get work that's play for you.
Circumstantial evidence is occasionally very convincing, as when you find
a trout in the milk.
Circumstantial evidence is occasionally very puzzling, as when you find
milk in a trout.
When you find a trout in the milk, it suggests a new way of cooking fish.
When you find a trout in the milk, make the cat happy.
When you find a trout in the milk, make a lawyer happy.
History is the propaganda of the victors.  Ernst
Toller, German poet and dramatist [01 Dec 1893 – 22 May 1939]. {his name
is not Victor Toller}Victor
Hugo [26 Feb 1802 – 22 May 1885] wrote no history.
Victor
Borge [03 Jan 1909 – 23 Dec 2000] wrote no history.
 Dead men tell no tales.
Poetry and drama are the propaganda of the vanquished.
Dead dogs wag no tails.